


Bordertober - 31 Days of Drabbles

by kriegslastbraincell



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Borderlands OC - Freeform, Bordertober, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, F/M, KingCharon, psyren - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:20:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 10,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26957974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kriegslastbraincell/pseuds/kriegslastbraincell
Summary: Inspired by KingCharon on tumbr, these are my drabbles for Bordertober! I've held myself to a standard of writing 500 words or less per prompt. Most of these focus on Krieg and Maya, but there's a few other character drabbles thrown in there too.
Relationships: Ava/OC, Krieg/Maya (Borderlands)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	1. Dark Matter

**Author's Note:**

> If you like to find the original posts on tumblr, you can find me there as KriegsLastBraincell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m doing KingCharon‘s Bordertober! (See their original post here: https://kingcharon.tumblr.com/post/629996024740675584/okay-yall-i-did-some-compiling-and-its-here)  
> I can’t draw, but I do write! And with their blessing (see also: encouragement), I’m going to use their template and write short (i.e. less than 500 word) drabbles for Krieg/Maya.

_**Dark matter** does not absorb, reflect, or emit light, but makes up roughly 80% of the universe’s mass._

* * *

Greed sits in a place of power. It is not a bystander, a senile influence, or a kind-hearted hand on a weak shoulder. It is a burden that breaks knuckles and bloodies noses and splits lips. It is a sour, metallic tang that sweeps across the tongue and yellows the teeth. 

Greed is conceptual and invisible. It appears only as effects: an unmitigated infection that writhes through saltless masses with unhinged jaws and waggling tongues.

Krieg thinks of himself as less of a pawn to Greed and more of an artist for Hunger. 

He bends over his finished work, brushstrokes from the teeth of his buzz axe painted in long, crimson strokes across the parched canvas of Pandora. Is Hunger insanity the same way Greed is malignant? He chews on the philosophical fat, running it’s squelching edges between his teeth and tasting the unformed shape on his bitter tongue. 

_It isn’t fair,_ he thinks with gasping breaths filling his mask. _It isn’t_ **_fair!_ ** _It shouldn’t have ended, not like this. Not like this… Maya…_

Blood runs in thick lines down his naked, throbbing chest. It seeps into the tattered fabric coiled around his forearms and drains its wet color against his flesh. There is no innocence here any longer. It seems, most likely, that there never was any to begin with.

There’s something cold and coiled and thick wrapped around itself and nested in his guts. It’s the deepest shade of hatred able to be seen by the naked eye. 

Krieg watches with a splintered focus as that damned propaganda sings over the dancing airwaves. He watches Maya turn to dust. 

The stars behind his eyes fizzle and die. Something hideous takes its place. 

For now, Krieg resigns himself to the anger and grows heavy. 

_From here to the edge of the galaxy,_ he thinks. _There is no place you can hide._


	2. Red Dwarf

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day twooooooo. I’m still holding myself to little drabbles and honestly? I’m having a good time.

_**Red dwarf** stars make up the largest population of stars in the galaxy, but they hide in the shadows, too dim to be seen with the naked eye from Earth. Their limited radiance helps to extend their lifetimes, which are far greater than that of the sun. _

* * *

Life on Pandora was unpredictable at best. 

At its core, however, Pandora is a tomb of plentiful secrets with a history of sullied ground. The planet itself is a graveyard adorned with desecrated corpses. Pandora’s essence is leathery skin and broken ribs cracked open like the shell of exotic fruits. Chalky bones reach up from the silt haplessly towards the ever-present sun. Thick bands of muscle and ropes of intestine feed the agitated denizens of the strange and dangerous copper-colored land.

Maya sees Pandora the same way most people do. Blood-laden and swollen with psychosis forever unexplained. 

But Maya, because of _and_ in spite of her cosmic rarity, seeks that which lingers just beneath the surface. Something that ducks beneath the safety of shadows, dutifully hidden from the naked gaze of piercing eyes. She, as Vault Hunter, searches out things beyond casual means and inconsequential leanings. 

What she finds is Krieg. He is the embodiment of a liminal space. A self-contained duality whose existence is limited, yet exhaustively far-reaching. 

Krieg, like everything on Pandora, is clot in the primordial veins of the universe. He chokes up the lightless tunnels and disrupts the flow of normalcy. 

Maya sees herself reflected in Krieg’s ceaseless entropy. She sees herself reflected in the singular eye and witnesses the shifting of stars and aligning of planets. She sees, if only for a moment, what is truly hidden in the darkest shadows of the universe’s misfortunes. 

Some part of her knows that the endless chaos ripping through Krieg will outlast even the collapse of a galaxy. She admires his ability to keep _going._

Maya knows that he will outlast even the most dire circumstances. 

She hopes she’ll outlast too.


	3. Albedo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m so late with this one! I cleaned my house and took a second between making dessert to throw this together. I was told by KingCharon that these are like little love letters and it made me misty eyed. I hope you enjoy them!

_**Albedo:** the proportion of the incident light or radiation that is reflected by a surface, typically that of a planet or moon. _

* * *

Massive is too small a word. 

Krieg chews his tongue and substitutes  _ titanic, gargantuan, egregious _ . Words he forces into a haphazard shape, barely containing his tired platitudes.  _ Missing,  _ and  _ longing,  _ and  _ zeal _ \-- the sourness of the latter being a disappointment to his howling non compos mentis --all housed in the space between self and unself. 

The burden of loss, its weight Atlian, hangs dutifully on his shoulders. Chaos and calamity are nursing on the nectar dripping from the wilting petals swirling around honeysuckle memories. 

Unrest sings to him. A trail of carrion, breadcrumbs to his anguish, cling in bits and specks he flicks from his skin. 

Krieg turns and Elpis warms his face. Memories swirl in the crimson blindness behind his closed eyes. Lilith. Maya. The universe’s most priceless gifts simultaneously given and taken away. 

Sorrow worms through him and chews unfillable holes. His bitterness rolls around the insatiable mouth of his emotions, a red and supple snap-hiss turning to wine in the pit of his stomach. 

Krieg stops. Feels his breath. Listens to the thrum of his heart. Shadows and silt-laden wind crawl over his sweat damp skin. 

Memory reflects emotion. 

Somehow, Elpis smiles.


	4. Riptide - grandson

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve been exited for day 4 because grandson is one of my top ten artists. I’ve seen him in concert/met him twice and he’s a rad, rad person. Riptide is a bangin’ song and the lyrics I think are very apropos Krieg.

❝I _have done bad things,_ _  
__Done them to good people._ _  
__Got no self-control,_ _  
__It’s the root of my evil._ _  
__Wage war in my head when I’m tryna keep it peaceful,_ _  
__A little feels good, a little more and it’s lethal--_ _  
__Save me from myself…_ ❞

* * *

Erratic and irregular, our movements drag through the sands. 

With careless abandon we etch weeping lacerations into the surface of Pandora’s withered skin. Endless and arid, this dusty canvas of umber and ochre seems a place perfect to disentangle the shroud knot that-

_TIES THE MEATMAN IN WITH THE LOUD SMALLNESS._

Yes, of course. The meat and the smallness. Chaos embodied, covered in sweat and still warm viscera. Swinging an axe and baring our teeth as though animalism were second nature while humanity no longer- 

_SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP I’LL EAT YOUR LUNGS!_

Can we please just have a discussion for once? The silence inside of our own head is deafening. We are lonely. We need to learn to work together. To see her again, to find ourself. 

We sit in silence and stare at the seam of the horizon. Feeling nothing, save for the agitated burn nested in every nook and cranny occupied by the internalized damage, we see yellow and we see red. 

I look to myself. It doesn’t have to be this way, you know. We’ve learned a lot together. Never the innocent, we’ve only ever hurt the _garbage people_ … 

The silence swallows us. The fervor boiling behind our sternum bubbles up. We stop, clapping the handle of his buzz axe into our palm. Our bloodlust, _his_ bloodlust, courses through our veins.

_SILENCE THE SMALL MAN WITH THE HOWLING SCREAMS OF BLOODY HATRED!_

I suppose this is the way of things. No treaties, no peace deals, no mutual understanding. We stand on strong, misshapen feet and denigrate collectivism. I don’t want us to hurt people, but this is the way of things. 

We have done terrible things, sometimes to those who didn’t deserve it. I have threatened to end our life. And regardless of my hand in it, I can do nothing but watch, morbidly curious and pretentiously revolted, at the trail of corpses we leave behind. 

  
❝ _I’ve been caught up in the riptide for too long ‘cos it’s all I know.  
I’ve been letting this shit slide.  
These bad habits, they die too slow.  
I've been caught up in the riptide for too long 'cos it's all I know.  
I've been letting this shit slide.  
But if you love me let me go. _❞


	5. Blueshift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This prompt was one was the easiest things for me to write. We love a soft man here.

_**Blueshift** describes how light shifts toward shorter or longer wavelengths… if an object moves closer, light moves to the blue end of the spectrum, its wavelengths get shorter. _

* * *

She’s just beneath his fingers. 

Real and whole and nothing short of divinely perfect. Her breaths are even and long as they pass over her gently parted lips. So close to his own hidden just beneath the mask. 

She whines and shifts in her sleep. Shimmies through the unwound sheets and towards the warmth radiating from his naked chest. Her hands are lithe and soft. Small, fragile things that touch him with a tender grace he was not owed. His heart in her debt, her love in his veins. 

He doesn’t move, for fear she’d slip away. He traces over every soft curve of her face: kissing her mouth with his eyes, stroking the apple of her cheek with a sigh. She stays a whole perfect _her_. Sapphire Starlight, a celestial angel emitting baby hues that chase the shadows back into their corners. 

She stirs again to sigh his name. Beautiful and delicate as it rolls over her sleeping tongue, the whisper of adoration runs its fingers along the shell of his ear. He shudders against its warmth and places a palm on the mound of her hip. 

Silence is peace here. Unbothered by the outside world, the inner turmoil settles into place. No longer torn apart, he holds himself together in unrestrained harmony. She helps keep the picture aligned. 

She moves closer again. He holds her now. Not tightly and not quite loose, but much, much more dearly.


	6. Gravity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Krieg and I just want him and Maya to be happy dammit.

_**Gravity** , or **gravitation** , is a natural phenomenon by which all things with mass or energy—including planets, stars, galaxies, and even light—are brought toward one another. _

* * *

We don’t see eye to eye on damn near anything. 

He thirsts for blood, I’m hungry for knowledge. He chews up and spits out any transient thoughts, I savor their individuality and particle uniqueness. He howls, unfed and angry, and I subsist on a drip feed of memory and sanity. 

Somewhere in the middle we collide. Butting heads and baring teeth, bloodied fingernails digging into sallow flesh in a savage vie for any ground worth coveting. Back and forth and back again, we push and shove like children. 

Try as we may, we can’t avoid one another. Our paths will always cross again, orbiting around some imagined sense of responsibility to the self. 

He hates me, I tolerate him. We disagree and argue, unable to find common ground in our own axis. Inverted, we talk about the differences and pay no mind to the glaring similarities. Do we even notice the thinning seam, where one of us knits into the other? Do we notice the blurred lines? The horizon a glimmering mirage? 

Before we realize, we’ve grown together… somehow. She helps us reconcile, but the labor falls onto us. We shoulder the burden: golden guns on lush trees, a house, a wife…

We are him and me. We are I and us. Indivisible in our togetherness, something shifts inside of us. We become a whole to serve as a pedestal to living memory.

She brings us together, and we set aside our differences. 

After all, she is damn never everything.


	7. Apastron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve been at this a whole week already! Heck yeah! 
> 
> Also, for context-- I have this idea about Siren Valhalla and it’s really heavy on pocket-dimension-afterlife sort of shit. I’m planning on expanding on that more in an AU that is currently in the works. More to come! Either way, enjoy~

_**Apastron** : the point of maximum separation between two stars. _

* * *

Has it been three days or two weeks? A year, maybe? Longer?

I wish I could count the days. I wish they were linear. I wish night didn’t blend into day, a flavourless grey paste. I wish I could look down, past the pitch sea shimmering with a hundred thousand tiny particles of light, and see him one more time. 

I always try to find him. Walking on the surface of galaxies, as my naked feet send ripples across its crystalline face, I peer through the cracks and squint until my eyes water. 

The Elder gals frown upon this. My so-called “fascination” with the mortal coil. “You belong here, Sister,” they say. “This is your final place of Power.” 

I want to accept that. Really, I do. I want to bite my tongue and bide my time. But I want to keep my promise more. I want him to look up at the stars and _see_ me the way I _heard_ him. I want to put his name in celestial font, spelling out my affection like a lovesick teenager. I can’t drop my fascination. These grandiose gestures are the last thread tethering me to where I belong. 

Nyriad doesn’t understand my desire to get out of this place. Lilith doesn’t either. I can’t blame them. Where one of them is saddled with enormous guilt, and the other is enjoying retirement in the most literal sense. They have their own reasons to stay. But me? I can’t resign myself to some fabled afterlife given to me by luck and circumstance. Nothing about this is earned, it’s a byproduct of being one of the rarest things in the universe. Well, having _been_ one, I guess. 

I kneel on the stars and put my ear against the ground. I beg to hear something, anything to put my ill heart at ease. I’m met only by the dull warble of space, the heartbeat of the universe pounding in my ears. I thrum with un-life, a bite-sized piece of carrot in the primordial soup. 

I bang my palms on the surface, splattering my arms with droplets of light and flakes of stardust. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, and here I am, breaking yet _another_ promise. 

From my own lips: _death and time can’t take us away from each other._ My mouth had shaped around the words “if I go.” I thought that _if_ might have given me a little more time. 

I fall onto my heels and stare out into the cosmos. Something sharp and obtuse pulls at me. It’s warm and familiar and smells a little like blood. 

The stars shift, a couple of planets align. The tugging becomes pulling, the pulling becomes yanking. 

_Krieg._

At least he never let me go.


	8. Cannibalize

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I went a different route with this one and wrote about Troy. I have a lot of ideas about all that shit that’s on his back/plugged into the back of his skull, as well as the lines in his face. Moral of this story: Troy was wronged.
> 
> Side note: tw for vomit. It’s not gratuitous but I want to be respectful.

_**Cannibalize:** to make a machine or piece of machinery stop working. _

* * *

Troy grips the wires. 

Pressed into his palm, slick and arterial, it fills his stomach with writhing tendrils that crawl eagerly up his throat. His fingers tremble and dance along the back of his neck, connecting with the foreign metal and hairless flesh. His own skin feels unlived in, hollow and unfeeling. 

Seething pain infests the discs of his spine and burrows into the marrow, it’s feral, unfed teeth gnashing against the veil of his innermost self. Hiccupping sobs clutch his chest and rip him apart at the frayed seams. 

He grips the wires again, this time forcing the toxicity of hesitation back into his stomach. Blinding white agony weakens his palm and the wires stay firmly nested within him.

Troy leans over and vomits. From the pain, the shock-horror, the mutilation, he can hardly distinguish one from the next. Agony, anguish and the corporeal betrayal bring a second wave of bile past his lips. 

He gags, winces, and touches the bandaged incisions dividing his cheeks in haphazard parallel lines. Viscid warmth seeps through the wrapping, tenderly kissing the unwitting pads of his fingers. It hurts to flinch, but he can no longer tell himself otherwise. 

His autonomy is somewhere outside of himself. Left in the waste of an unwanted operation, an eviscerated mess of who he was or could have been died on that makeshift table. Troy squeezes his eyes closed, pressing the heels of his hands in until flashes of lightning break apart the choking darkness. 

His head swims and Troy struggles to hold himself up. He braces himself, steeling the last of his resolve against the bubbling anger scorching his veins. 

Tyreen looks at him from across the room with hunger and meaningless pity in her shallow gaze. Typhon holds her, cradling her shoulders against his torso. His eyes are wet and shimmering with self-assurance. 

Troy spits out a sour decay. He swims through a cold sea and grapples for driftwood from the wreckage sinking just below the surface. 

Plunging below, Typhon’s voice crests on a wave, “it’s for the best.”


	9. Still Heading - EDDIE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, all I’m saying is that Dr. Benedict is a callous motherfucker who deserves to be ripped to shreds by Krieg.

❝ _ This is just a bad memory, _ _   
_ _ This is just a short summary, _ _   
_ _ All the pain you caused me, _ _   
_ _ All the blame I received. _ ❞

* * *

Shrill and hollow, the baying drill chews through bone and marrow and viscera. It’s spiraling teeth tunnel through the softest parts of him, sliding in and out of dying flesh and bloodied fissures. Split open, raw and ragged, Krieg dies on the table the first time. 

There’s something to be said about the influence of the pain. The irreversible loss of self as you become a martyr to someone else’s cause. It came over Krieg in cycles. Like the tides, it pulls and pushes his limp body with merciless abandon. 

High on the fumes of spilt blood and congenital terror, Dr. Benedict ruins lives one by one. He, unfettered by the burden of sympathy or compassion, wraps the last strands of Krieg’s humanity around his curling fingers. Reopening old wounds and suturing unbroken skin, the doctor’s benedictions are praise to an unspeakable hell. 

Krieg dies a second, third, and fourth time on Dr. Benedict’s table. The more his heart stops, the further his mind spirals into disarray. He begs for mercy, for grace. He cries, cold and abandoned, surrounded by soiled concrete and wails of agony. Night bleeds into day and broken threads of his sanity unravel. 

All he sees is red.

When Krieg comes to, he isn’t sure where he is or how he got there. He doesn’t know why there’s blood on his hands, dripping down his arms, and pooling into the prisoner’s outfit he’s been wearing for as long as he can remember. The tang of rust and pewter is overwhelming and Krieg grows weary. He touches his face, the skin ragged and unfamiliar. 

And then, he hears it. 

Chewing on its own hands in the back of his mind, it calls to him, “ _ THE ROLLING BONES WILL BREAK OUR GROWLING CHAINS!”  _

There’s no one else around. Krieg’s mouth grows dry and sour. He rubs his arms and thinks tiredly he should probably cover up the scarring on his face. 

The gnawing starts again, but closer this time. Krieg, unsettled by it all, takes off running. With no direction and a modicum of power back in his hands, he’ll think about details later. 

It’s really too bad the damage is done.


	10. Kelvin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m back on my bullshit with Troy, but who can blame me? That poor man has been through a lot. Let him rest.

_Absolute zero, the coldest known temperature, is reached at 0 degrees_ **_Kelvin_** _._

* * *

Did it matter? Did anything really, truly matter?

Troy lays on his back, sand cushioning the plate and wires entangled with the discs in his spine, and stares out at the limitlessness of Pandora’s fleeting night. A blanket of obsidian winking playfully at him, thousands of stars just out of his grasp, drape over the cliffs and edges of his exhausted body. 

There’s a chorus of gunfire and screams in the distance that rattles whatever sense of peace he’d been trying so desperately to cultivate. _Pandora’s ambiance,_ he thinks with some heat boiling in his chest. _What a soothing and wholesome place to be._

Troy tucks his arm beneath his head. Cradles the wires and makes his own eyes water when one of them pulls. He sighs, travels the galaxy with his eyes, longing to find his true home somewhere in all that Elysian expanse. 

Sand crunches behind him. Troy doesn’t bother to look up. He knows exactly who’s gone out of _her_ way to find him. Just like childhood. Just like home. 

“Get up, Troy. We’ve got a meeting!” 

“With who.” 

“Aurelia Hammerlock, some ice queen of a woman who is going to get warmed by _my_ holy hellfire. She’s taken a shine to you from afar so this relationship might be more profitable than even _you_ can imagine!” 

The awe and burgeoning sense of comfort melts into the sand. Troy doesn’t move. He squeezes his eyes shut and begs the silt and grit to return what it stole. Hopes that maybe, just maybe, his coat will be thick enough to drag his fleeting moment of sense and accord back into his pores. 

“Yeah,” he says blankly, opening his eyes and begging the stars to pull him into their boundless embrace. “Cool.”


	11. Luminosity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I write Krieg and Maya being tender my skin clears up.

_ In astronomy,  _ **_luminosity_ ** _ is the measure of radiant power emitted by a star.  _

* * *

Some people laugh with their eyes. Their joy is physical and pulls the skin taut, a smile broadening the horizon of their face. Others laugh from the deepest pits in their stomachs, their outward joy cradled beneath thatched sinew and hiccuping muscles. There are those who pull laughter from the nook just beneath the bottom of their heart, those who exhale sharply through their noses, and those who quiver in silent joy, breathless with dancing shoulders and heaving chests. 

And there are some people, rarer still, who laugh with their soul. Wearing a naked radiance, their innermost self breaks through the skin and spills untamed light over every fiber of themselves. 

Maya is a rarity, through and through. A siren who laughs with her soul, a woman who hears that which often goes unheard, a person who cares deeply, loves wholly, and transmutes somber to sublime. 

Krieg cannot see her any other way. He cannot parse her from the overwhelming enormity of the universe-- they are two ethereal bodies orbiting one another. She is the sun, moon, and stars. And he, in his own view, is a lifeless planet begging for her warmth. 

He spouts a conscious stream of inflammatory nonsense, and the room is cast in the glow of Maya’s exuberance. It doesn’t matter what he said or why, it matters that she laughed. 

Krieg bends to gravity, pulling their bodies together. Maya shines, her glimmering perfection casting shadows across his face. 

  
  


❝ _ You’re my satellite.   
_ _ You’re riding with me tonight.  
_ _ Passenger side,  
_ __ Lighting the sky,  
_ Always the first star that I find,  
_ __ You’re my satellite. ❞


	12. Nebula

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea for this one came to me in a flood and if it were a cereal, it’d be “oops, all angst!” Also, if GearBox isn’t going to write Ava properly, I’ll do it myself.

_A_ **_nebula_ ** _is an enormous cloud of dust and gas occupying the space between stars and acting as a nursery for new stars._

* * *

The first time they meet is awkward. 

Krieg bites his tongue, grossly unsure of what to say. His eyes are still wet with grief, his lips still bloody from anxious chewing, his heart heavy and sinking lower still. Unable to pull himself into strands, he looks at her and heaves his barren, blood-splattered chest in anguished wheezes. 

Ava is a small, _fragile thing_ with songbird breaths skittering around her ribcage. Her thin fingers, swatched in Maya’s soothing glow, curl around a gun too big for her hand. Her eyebrows lower, her lip quivers. The edges of her eyes hold back a flood. Barely. 

“You’re… you’re him,” she says in a wispy voice. Her words are strung with disbelief. As if the hulking man before her were a mirage. His bloodied skin and broken psyche a trick of the light. “You’re Maya’s-”

“Sapphire starlight,” he wails, inconsolable. _I am… I_ was _Maya’s lover. Did she tell you about me? About us?_

Ava lowers her gun. Falls into the sand, a tangle of weary, splaying limbs saddled with remorse. Krieg wants to tell her it’s okay, but the anger towards this _child_ pinches his lips. Better safe than sorry, he supposed. 

Ava digs through her bag, something akin to hesitation knitting her brows in a narrow line. “She left me something, sort of, to give to you. I didn’t want to, I don’t know, fuck it up…” 

An ECHO appears in Ava’s hand. Maya’s dancing script spells his name across the front. Ava, her little fingers shaking twice as hard, hits play. 

> _Krieg, I know I promised when I left Pandora that we'd see each other again. A lot’s happened since then. I met this... girl. She's a real handful, just like I was. She's headstrong, impulsive, and somehow twice as stubborn. But she's just a kid. And she needs better guidance than I had. The reason I'm saying all this is… yeah, I’m not sure… I’m not sure if every siren knows when they meet the person they're going to pass their gifts to... but I did. Ava’s my best shot at leaving this world a better one. Right now, I'm at the end of a thread of sirens spanning thousands of years and... I can feel each and every one still here, with me. And if that's possible, then I know that death and time can't take you and I away from each other. I'm too stubborn for that. So if I go, just know that I’ll see you in the stars, Big Guy. I promise._

A whisper of a memory echoes through his head. _TORN APART!_ His hand on her cheek, her hand on his arm. Gently squeezing. _I love you._ She smiles. _Don’t worry. I promise._

Kreig’s knees buckle. He sinks into the sand, head dropping like a stone. _This is it,_ he thinks. _She really_ is _gone._

Krieg’s thoughts are a million and none. He chews on his cheek, spilling blood across his tongue. To feel something, to verify that this is real. The pain, the truth, all of it laid before him. He sets his axe on the ground. Her words echo in his head. 

“I’m sorry,” a croaky whisper shatters him like glass. Ava, smaller somehow, has pulled her knees into her chest. She looks at Krieg with red eyes and cheeks pock marked with blossoms of emotion. The guilt, the remorse. This tiny, _tiny_ child carries it all. 

Krieg pushes himself out of the way. He sniffles, snorts, grunts. 

He extends a hand. 

Ava blinks asymmetrically. Without thought or hesitation, her hand seeks his. Their skin touches and light blooms along her arm. Ava sniffles this time. 

“Maya…” 

Krieg can’t force his lips into joy, but his gaze is thick with compassion. The sky is dark, absent of starlight in azure and cobalt. But in its place, a supernova swells in shades of iris and plum. A new star, young and spirited, takes roost in his sky. 

Maya’s words run through his head again. His fingers curl gently around Ava’s. _Don’t worry Maya,_ he thinks with the hope that one day he can be heard again. _I’ll look after her._

_I promise._


	13. Mercy - Bo Baskoro

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Imho: Troy is incredibly resentful he is Tyreen’s shadow-- always two steps behind because she’s running to purposefully leave him behind. I am of the firm belief that Troy deserved better.

❝ _ But I'm losing my sleep...  
_ _ Trying to find the difference between you and me. _ ❞

* * *

The  _ twin  _ Gods. The Calypso  _ twins. _

They were always seen as one, a single unit, inseparable from each other since birth. Grouped together so tightly in everyday conversation, infallible reverence, and gnashing hatred, Troy and Tyreen were a singularity in totality. 

But… were they? Or were there threads pulling apart the seams? Spilling plush guts and unbridled turmoil everywhere? 

Tyreen speaks in acknowledgement of the unaccompanied self:  _ I’m  _ going to be God Queen, look at what was left for  _ me _ ,  _ I’ll  _ be a god. Forgetting any falsified loyalty to blood, she rallies their followers around her. The God Queen, the illustrious leader. 

Troy latches onto his own sense of self. In tired desperation, he tries to parse his individuality from the shadow of a cosmos that sought to outshine every universe that dared add a modicum of luminescence to a hopeless void. 

He denigrates himself to appease her. Clinging to threads of life, his loyalty is only strong enough to hold him up. Sick, sick, sick again and again, he stays in the background and hopes to become something. Someday. 

Troy only gets one shot at correcting the record. He’s done things that bring him shame, remorse, and anger. He’s speaking to her right now. But she’s his ticket to the Vault… thiefs. Hunters. Fuckers. Vault Assholes. 

Troy turns to the door. Grapples with his own power and pain. Four bodies, suspended in his grasp. He pulls them in. 

One chance for differentiation. One chance to assert himself. 

One chance to step out of the shadows and into the light. 


	14. Parasite

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can’t believe I’ve pumped out two whole weeks’ worth of Borderlands content. Thanks for sticking with me and interacting with my posts, gives me the good feelies. Enjoy more Calypso Twins content.

_ “ _ **_I’m_ ** _ the Siren, he’s just a parasite. Literally! When we were born, our father had to cut him off of me. Now  _ **_I’m_ ** _ the only thing keeping him alive.”  _

* * *

With her tongue to the wire, Tyreen draws the line between us and I. 

She laudes herself: a hero, a savior, a mother, and a lifeline. She’s the eye of a storm, an island strewn with wreckage, a pedestal where devotion stands. A daughter, a sister, a friend. 

Troy is the backdrop. Minute details overlooked that led to Tyreen’s shores. The cataclysmic rock face, the howling winds that warn of destruction, the back that cradles a leader’s step. More human and less being, Troy is tethered to Tyreen by countless threads. 

He lives in the twilight zone between ego and humility. Always asking for help, being made to feel like an inconvenience, but desperately (hopelessly) holding onto something akin to the self. Maybe it’s hope, but more likely spite.

Maya turns to dust in his hand. Years of doubtless thoughts, being told what his place was in life, dying against his palm. Power,  _ real  _ power, courses through his withered veins. His cells, each individual particle that holds him up and forces his heart to beat, sing with life. Flourishing, Troy looks at Tyreen. 

“ _ I thought you could only take from  _ **_me_ ** _. _ ” 

“I guess it’s… any Siren…” 

Though he feigns some doubt, Troy is elated. This is it.  _ Finally _ . A fucking out. 

“ _ Come on, we got what we came for. _ ”

Troy balls his fist. Feels his nails bite into his palm. Feels blood dance just beneath the surface of his skin. Vibrates with energy that belongs to him. For once, Troy sees the fear he’d felt for so long reflected in Tyreen’s eyes. He glows brightly. 

“Yeah,” pride comes before the fall. “And a whole lot more.” 


	15. Unavailable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little bit of spice to round out the start of Bordertober Week 3.

_(Of a person) not free to do something; otherwise occupied._

* * *

Lilith parades around Sanctuary with some frustration, her jackboot steps heavy with intent. “Has anyone seen Maya? Or Krieg? _Anyone?_ No? Dammit…” 

On the opposite side of the city, hidden in some nameless alcove away from the rest of the crew, Krieg and Maya are stealing just a bit of their time back. 

It started with Maya, as it usually does, insisting that they take a _lunch break_. Maya wasn’t afraid to deal with a little trouble, though she much preferred to create some with the help of her lover. 

She runs through the city streets and ducks around corners, leading him on. Her laugh is sweet and sonorous, bouncing off of every building and structure that it touches. Krieg tails her, his laugh rocks tumbling down the mountainside. 

He loses her briefly, panic flying into him. He thunders through an alleyway, maw gaping to call for his _pretty lady_. 

She finds him first. A hand reaching out, touching his chest, and derailing the train. Krieg ducks into the alcove, Maya’s laughter intoxicating against his skin. 

Her hands trace his jaw, her eyes speaking to him in earnest. She cups the mask, “is this okay? Are you alright?”

Krieg nods and Maya kisses his naked lips. 

Lilith is an hour into her hopeless search. Maya is pushed against a wall, Krieg’s hands behind her knees, while she pulls his head into the crook of her neck to silence his grunts and her gasping. Maya’s biting her lip until it turns purple, sweat racing down her spine, warmth blossoming in the pit of her stomach and curling her toes. 

They collapse against the wall, out of breath and desperately, hopelessly in love. Intimacy is not rare between them, but moments of spontaneity were fleeting and priceless. 

“We should probably get back. Lilith’s gonna flip her lid,” Maya laughs, kissing the outside of Krieg’s mask as her fingers tenderly fasten the straps just outside of his grasp.

Krieg looks at her, cocks his head to the side, gently walks his fingers along her hip. Maya’s lips pulling into a knowing smile. “Alright, Big Guy. You’re right. It is so much more fun to be **_unavailable_ **.”


	16. Obfuscation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t generally write for Tyreen, but sometimes you start and you don’t stop until you’ve written an entire drabble from her POV. This one is a little dark and a little nsfw, so read at your own risk.

**_Obfuscation:_ ** _ to throw into shadow; to darken. _

* * *

Tyreen’s teeth are tombstones behind her kiss-bruised lips. Red and velvet, she swipes her hungry tongue over the chapped skin, chewing the corner of her own flesh to stave off an appetite that never quite ceased. Buried in every dark corner and hidden passageway of her person, Tyreen willingly succumbed to the animosity parallelled only by the monsters tucked away in Eridian closets. 

She sucks the tip of her index finger, teasing her own pallet with the ringing tang of freshly spilled blood. Surrounding her on the plush bed are five or six vapid corpses, all looking at her with horror and reverence. She jabs her heel into the nose of the nearest husk, turning what was once a beautiful woman into a glittering pile of ash and dust.

Still wet with fresh sex and hunger, Tyreen traces along her own chest, graciously admiring her own curves and edges. She sucks a second finger, wrapping her senses around the shared warmth of an overdue climax and a good meal. 

The sun is blistering Pandora’s tender flesh, and Tyreen draws the curtains over her queen’s billet. Shadows crawl over the amethyst protrusions of the hard earned eridium tier followers given the highest honor of licking the God-Queen’s… 

_ Well.  _

She smiles and relishes the raw memory of the light that had shone behind dilated pupils disappearing into blanched marbles immortalizing the final moments of unrelenting agony. 

Tyreen lays back into a mound of stained pillows and sighs freely, unbothered by the haze of mortality hanging low in the fragrant air. “They always taste better when they’re afraid.” 


	17. fine - Mike Shinoda

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is late, late, late. I’m bad out getting these out at a decent hour on the weekends. Ah well. Either way, this prompt is a great one to talk a little bit out my boy Orion. He is a Good Boy(tm) and I would let him kick my ass. 
> 
> Also, TW for some implied abusive stuff. 
> 
> Also also, I based this one a little bit off of one of KingCharon's Bordertober prompts with Orion in it! Check that out here: https://kingcharon.tumblr.com/post/630992641295794176/bordertober-day-3-evening-rb-for-technical

_ “Fingers stretching out from nowhere, _ _   
_ _ Reaching for my throat. _ _   
_ _ They’re hungry for my skin…”  _

* * *

The denizens of the Anvil were tough as nails. Hardened badasses and killers without a drop of remorse swirling through their viscera, these were people intentionally stowed away from an extensive catalogue of places starting at the mouth and ending at the asscrack of the six galaxies. 

Or, most of them were. 

Locked in a solitary cell was a scrawny individual with baby blond hair in kinky knots hanging limply down his back. Stripped of his bindings and his dignity, Orion was a tangle of emaciated limbs covered in dirt and regurgitated meals. He smelt of misery and bile, and looked as though one leg had sunk into the mud of a shallow grave. 

Orion believed he would die here. In a cell with no cover, unable to hide the parts of himself he’d kept bound up in dirty bandages, he was often a victim of the guards’ unrestrained animosity. His ribs were kicked and bruised, his lip split, his nose broken again. 

While not unique to him, it seemed as though the patrols that made hourly rounds enjoyed hazing him the most. He clung desperately to life, spitting blood and acid while his body shuddered and his mind stalled like a broken technical. 

Short on hope, Orion sat on the cold floor and stared through the even slats of the cell bars. He watched the sun dip below the horizon, his eyes walking along the concrete and dancing shadows. 

Bleary eyed and wracked with exhaustion, it isn’t until the shadows deepen in hue that Orion takes note of the presence looming above him. Glowering and glowing vermillion, the God-King looks down at his crumpled body. His eyes are unreadable, but the sourness welling on his mouth speaks to pity, ill at ease. 

“You,” his voice is a blood-soaked razer, all sharp edges and slick with disdain. A hand curls around the iron bar and the God-King’s knuckles blanche. “Are going to be my friend from now on.”


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is also super late. I’m not feeling 100% today but I am very proud of this one.

_ Any small celestial bodies that may have existed at an early age of the development of the solar system.  _

* * *

Innocence had beget fanaticism. Grandeur stories, larger than life, with words so bold they cast shadows on the night-swathed walls swirled around the children’s grey matter. Their brains devoured every lingering detail, lapping up the colours and shapes of adventure that put stars behind their eyes. 

Troy and Tyreen were so young. Little things with barely enough sense to wander away from a waterfall’s edge, it was Typhon who put them to bed with sugared thoughts of daring. At first, it was exciting. The trials and tribulations, each different from the last, was more tantalizing than the first. 

When the  _ hunger  _ set in, that sugar turned to salt. Lemon and cayenne in the fresh wounds that Tyreen herself didn’t understand but didn’t stop from spreading. She licked her own spilt blood from her skin and wanted so much more. 

And when her soles touch the ochre sand of Pandora, when a thousand bits of human debris cling to her every step and word, when she eats and eats and eats until the fullness from fear and flesh is enough to wrack her body with shudders… 

It’s then she understands her birthright. Her importance, the macrocosm of the self. She treads, fully and unrestrained, across the stars. 

It’s really no wonder she turns her own lineage back to stardust.


	19. Redshift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to write this one as a reverse of blueshift. It’s a bit... uhm, crunchy.

**_Redshift_ ** _ describes how light shifts to shorter or long wavelengths… if an object moves further away, light moves to the red end of the spectrum, its wavelengths get longer.  _

* * *

She’s out of his reach. 

Gone to a place that he cannot reach, to a world he does not understand, and in a place he cannot follow. Some part of him is unable to comprehend the loss. The wet agony and grief float across the boiling surface, fat and water and oil glistening on the top layer of his brain. 

Krieg loses control of himself. Retreats deep into the recesses of his own mind and takes a coward’s shelter from the storm. 

Outside, the sands are red. Washed with the outward expression of Krieg’s calamity, COV and garden variety psychos fall to their knees before his axe, his fists. Pounding flesh to tender supernovas of purple and blue, stepping on bones until the tapestry tears from the loom, crunching teeth and splattering rabid tongues ripped clean from the sockets. 

He doesn’t stop. For hours, days perhaps. Soaking the ground as his anguish floods the leather and plastic of his mask. With bloodied knuckles and bruised ribs, Krieg wears the badges of Pandora’s untamed wilds. 

Krieg wanders home, following the breadcrumbs of corpses. He stumbles into the lightless embrace of his cavern. Listens to his own gasping breaths echo off of the stone. Devoid of emotion, viscera crusting beneath his nails, he collapses. Barely conscious, Krieg whimpers. 

“ _ Pretty… lady…” _


	20. Evil - 8 Graves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t have a lot to say about this one. I know a lot of people don’t agree with how I portray Tyreen and let me just say from the bottom of me heart: that’s totally fine. I hope, even if you don’t agree with my methods, you still like seeing her in a different light!

_ “Shoot the moon. _ _   
_ _ Stab the sun _ _   
_ _ Got a curse _ _   
_ _ On the tip of my tongue.”  _

* * *

Troy is sleeping. Has been for a while. 

It’s not surprising, all things considered. He spent the longest, darkest hours of the night awake. Editing and splicing frames of Tyreen, drenching her lust for power, her ravenous appetite for murder and bloodletting, in rose coloured light. At her behest, he burned through the wick of night behind a screen, pumping out tainted food that whipped their already rabid followers into a deeper frenzy. 

He didn’t have the same taste for chaos that Tyreen possessed, but he continued disseminating propaganda anyway. He thought, often, about the thousand moving parts of their righteous army, oiled with the blood of alleged heretics and indoctrinated spit. 

Tyreen watches him sleep. She stands over his slumped body, her liquid eyes bright and curious as his limbs rise and fall unevenly. She has precious little room in her body for pity, and feels only the grating irritation of responsibility. She looks at him the way a welder looks at the weakest link in a chain, the way a gardener looks at a dying limb. 

Tyreen cups her palm around a bit of her own power. Watches it thrum and pulse with life. Her lips pull into a subtle smile: pleasure and hatred kissing on her mouth. 

She takes Troy’s hand, washing them both in a gentle red glow. She breathes in, her lungs swollen with air as her cells gnaw on her brother’s idle energy. Tyreen grows, stronger and bursting at the seams of her own impunity. She purrs,  _ content.  _

The shadows beneath Troy’s eyes deepen. His breaths shallower than before, shy and unprofound. 

Tyreen lets go and gazes lovingly at her own hand. 

“Remember,” she says, patting Troy’s cheek. “ _ You’re  _ the parasite.” 


	21. Altruistic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is late, but I still did it! Also, for context: this my take on Maya’s experience with being dusted. I think Maya is such a complex character and she always gives me the “definitely knows way more than she lets on” vibe.

**_Altruistic:_ ** _ selfless concern for the wellbeing of others; unselfish _

* * *

“Ava,  _ don’t _ !” 

There was nothing to compare to, no injury in Maya’s repertoire came within a thousand feet of this. This pain, in the most literal sense of the word, a broiling and churning huger that swallowed her whole. She felt her limbs stiffen, the hand drinking the water from her cells a paralytic and strenuous grip she could not wiggle out of. 

But she knew this was coming. She’d seen it reflected in the cool waters of Athenas. It imprinted into her memories, turning restless sleep into something palpably visceral. The last handful of weeks had been the worst. Gritty and clotted, her dreams haunted by a disembodied voyeur. A reluctant witness to her own demise. 

She thought she’d have more time. More time to prepare Ava for an impending storm she, herself, could not stop. Maya had learned through self-reflection and experience that some things are just too large for one person to make sense of. That some things require an individual sacrifice. 

Maya, her skin turning to crepe, told her apprentice to be ready. She’d sent Krieg a message that seemed more foreboding than she realized. Her affairs were not entirely in order, (some higher power willing, Ava would not go rummaging through her more  _ intimate  _ belongings) but it would have to do. 

Maya saw something in that boy no one else seemed to notice. She had felt a shift coming. Taking shape in small ways at first, it had been growing by leaps and bounds until… 

Maya breathes out. She doesn’t mean to scream but it just  _ hurts _ so badly. 

When the world is swallowed whole and her soul falls through layers of darkness, Maya knows fate and time and death were holding hands and mourning for her. Honoring a sacrifice that would alter the course, even if only by a small margin. 

Maya smiles, despite it all. She knows her sacrifice would never be in vain. 


	22. Mislead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting this one so early! 
> 
> On that note, I am a lifelong member of the Hating-Typhon-DeLeon-Club. I also have so many theories and ideas about why Troy and Tyreen are the way that they are. Plus like, in my brain + in tandem with the canon, it just makes sense.

**_Mislead:_ ** _ to lead in a wrong direction or into a mistaken action or belief often by deliberate deceit _

* * *

Typhon looks at his children. Barely the size of his forearm, unable to hold up their heads up or open their eyes fully. They have little hands and little toes too weak to hold or grab or interact with the limitless beauty and hatred doled out by the universe in equal measure. 

They came out like that. Beauty and hatred in one amalgam. Typhon had heard of twins being joined at the hip but this was too literal for his tastes. 

He touches the girl’s cheek. Her breaths are fast and wispy, her pulse tachy and unrefined. The boy is different. His breath is even, his heart slow and serene. His face is twisted up in pain and the girl’s is a look of serenity. 

She seems to be pulling away from him. A growth at the top of the little boy’s frame. 

They glow in sync. 

Two of them, right there in front of him. Sirens, the rarest things in the universe.  _ Well,  _ he thinks lowly.  _ A siren and a pseudo-siren _ . __

Typhon’s surgical tools glint in the moonlight, hanging low and cool in Nekrotafeyo’s sky. The overcast is knitting across the sky ribbon-strings and plush rolls. Typhon prays to something, nothing, that he has the strength to do this. He convinces himself it’s better this way. Simpler. Just makes sense. 

He takes the syringe in his hand. There’s only enough for one after the birth. He flicks the vial, sending the lingering air bubbles to the throat of the needle. 

He injects Tyreen. She tries to scream, but the anesthetic works too quickly. She falls into a lull, her breaths still shallow and her pulse still weak. 

He’ll have to cut her off of the boy. His face is soft and sweet. Typhon assumes he’d be the type to have kind eyes. Just like his wife, sleeping back in the vault. Out here, away from their own little paradise, she won’t be able to hear the baby’s wails. 

Typhon pats the boy’s head. Full head of hair, thick too. It’s a damn shame. 

Fingers shaking, he makes the first cut. The boy’s little lungs are at full capacity and he wails. No great and terrible power locked away in a vault could scare Typhon as much as that sound. 

He continues cutting through flesh, dabbing at the boy’s side as blood pours from the jagged line drawn on his frail body. Typhon thinks he’s doing the boy, himself, Leda, and Tyreen a favour. 

He pockets the guilt and keeps cutting. It’d make more sense this way. It’d be easier to explain. Easier to live with. Tyreen is the siren, the boy is the parasite. He’d call her starlight and tell her stories about the vaults. He wouldn’t bring up the boy unless she asked, and if she didn’t, he’d spin her a tale about the scar on her back. Tyreen would need extra care, and Typhon was more than willing to provide. 

_ Besides,  _ Typhon thinks trying to drown out the gut-wrenching shrieks shaking the planet to its core. _ He probably wouldn’t survive this anyway _ .


	23. Cataclysm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to write more about Orion. He's got an interesting backstory that this few words does little justice to express. One day I'll expand on this more, but for now, enjoy a little more content about my boy!

**_Cataclysm:_ ** _ a large-scale and violent event in the natural world _

* * *

When the Children of the Vault dug their heels into Pandora’s running sands their efforts remade the natural landscape, turning barren dug-ins into sparse outposts that looked more like scrap yards and less like a well-run organization. 

What started as a few blemishes on the surface of the planet, haphazardly constructed outposts made of cheap metal and spiked limbs, quickly became an uncontrolled breakout. The COV were growing exponentially, their numbers a righteous dedication to a misguided cause. 

Orion hid himself in the ranks of his own clan as best he could. The rules, even for psychos, were rigid and unforgiving. Honoring the clan chief with his body, suturing wounds from daily skirmishes, cooking the nauseating fruits of their alleged conquest… 

He swallowed his morality and choked up bile as he forced himself to subsist on skag meat and a faint glimmer of hope for a better future. Pandora was hateful at best, but add in a misalignment with the self and that hate left much deeper wounds. 

Orion never wanted to follow the Calypsos. He had heard about them, a faint murmur of new power, from rival clans that began to fall away from their clan’s border one by one. He watched hundreds of psychos deliver themselves, human tokens of affection, to Tyreen Calypso. He listened, on quiet nights when he could steal away, to the ECHO net broadcasts and found himself hating the Holy Mouthpiece’s sandpaper and shrapnel voice. 

He hoped his clan might retain some sense, but when every other group of Pandora’s finest- brainless and lusting after spilt blood -began to overlook their imposed differences to unite under a single banner that danced in the hot winds, he knew it was only a matter of time before his landscape changed too. 

Orion wiped the blood and dye from his face with a cloth, wet with his spit. He freed himself from any lingering sense of loyalty, despite there being very little to begin with, and firmly decided it would be better to risk his life than to stay here a moment longer. 

Rumors about Tyreen’s ability were spreading. The husks of human debris she left strewn around her gargantuan steps, skinny little things obscured by the long reach of her shadow, was too much of a risk for Orion. He’d stayed with the Rot-Tooth Clan for this long to blend in and to survive. Better to be abused by one person than the entire planet. 

But he could no longer accept the moral low ground. It was no longer about just survival. Orion placated himself with thoughts like: there must be more to life than this and surely not everything out there was  _ that _ bad. 

But the truth is he was scared. He’d been born into this clan to parents who took a bite out of his tender shoulder, a mangled signal of parental love in their fucked up language. 

He touches the scar, feels the grooves of his parents’ bite embedded in his flesh. He looks to the open sky, watching the stars wink invitingly at him. He heaves a shaky breath and sneaks out past sleeping bodies strewn about the camp. He makes a point to flip off the clan chief on his way out. 

Orion is gripped with fear, but dripping with excitement. He’d talked with himself for years about leaving. It felt so easy to walk away now. 

He guessed it might have just taken the right push. A bit too bad the sands were soaked blood now. It would make running barefoot much more uncomfortable. 


	24. Collateral

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had a bad habit of posting the weekend prompts a day late and that is on me. It's cool though. 
> 
> Either way, for this prompt, I used it as an opportunity to write the start of a fic I have in mind. I hope it piques your interest, and once Bordertober is over it slides right into NaNoWriMo and I might just use this year to write fic.

**_Collateral:_ ** _ descended from the same stock but by a different line.  _

* * *

Ava slumps on the table’s surface, resting her head in the crook of her thin arm. She jabs her index finger into the CH+ button, flipping through empty channels and watching reruns of static. 

Krieg nudges her elbow and sets a plate in front of her nose. “Head up. Food.” 

Ava’s face sours and she nudges the plate away. It scrapes the table and Krieg’s patience. 

“Ava,” he sighs, reaching over her and placing a fork beside the plate. He nudges the food back to its starting point and pats her hooded hair. “I know you’re upset, but you still need to eat. I’m not going to ask you twice. Sit up and eat, please.” 

The groan that slips past her lips is a sound Krieg heard so often it sometimes permeated his sleep. A regular, untuned note in Pandora’s daily cacophony. 

Ava sits up and pushes the scrambled rakk egg around for a moment, watching it’s spongy texture exhale droplets of moisture. She wrinkles her nose and takes a pathetically small bite, indignantly scraping her teeth on the tines. Ava chews and swallows, feigning thoughtfulness, then sets the fork down. 

“It’s cold.” 

“Just eat it,” Krieg says, washing his empty plates in the grotty sink basin. He turns to look at her, crossing his thick arms over his chest. Fresh blood seeps into the bandage curled around his forearm. Yesterday’s bludgeoning is still raw in his recent visceral memory. 

He isn’t mad at Ava, really. She’s just a kid.  _ Still  _ just a kid, and she needs to be looked after. He promised Maya he’d take care of her. After all, Ava carried with her something more important than either of them realized. 

Krieg sighs and reaches out, touching Ava’s left shoulder with a gentleness that looked foreign on his bloodied hand. A faint blue light yawns and stretches along Ava’s arm. 

She recoils and pulls her hand into the safety of her chest. Ava grips her own wrist and looks at Krieg with a silver and sharpened edge in her eyes. The light shies away from its own shadow and fades into nothingness, hidden beneath the layers of Ava’s clothes and flesh. 

“Don’t,” her voice breaks like old bread. Ava’s eyes are pushing Krieg away. Her waterline is an ancient dam, seconds away from flooding. “How many times do I have to tell you? I’m  _ not  _ Maya, okay? You don’t have to act like you owe me something. Just because I have her power doesn’t mean-” 

Krieg sighs and shakes his head. He swallows the hot air and pushes down the red tinged heat swelling in the pit of his stomach. “I know, Ava. And I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I’m trying to keep you safe.” 

“Maya said that too, and look what happened to her. I don’t need people to keep me safe. I need to track down that bastard and fix this mess.”

“I can promise you, it’s not that easy.” 

Ava narrows her eyes. “Do all of you retired Vault Hunters think the same?” 

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” 

“I’ve already been burned. I don’t know about you, but I’m running towards the fire, Krieg. And if you’re too chickenshit to come, that’s on you.” 

Krieg wipes sweat from the skin poking out from beneath the mask. He forces himself to breathe, to focus on each individual moment. He forces himself to stay put despite the baying insanity pounding on the door. 

“Ava,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest again. “This isn’t about running towards the fire. That isn’t a fire you should intend to trifle with- it’s a goddamn inferno. And it is much, much bigger than you, or I, or Lilith, or even Maya.” 

“It doesn’t matter!” Ava erupts, standing from the table and drawing her gun. She doesn’t point it at anyone or anything, just wraps her shaking finger around the trigger. The atmosphere changes as quickly as night passes on Pandora. Krieg bristles. 

“It doesn’t matter.” She repeats. “And who cares if it’s bigger than Lilith or Maya? It’s really easy to be bigger than something dead.”


	25. Wrong Places Wrong Places - Unlike Pluto

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look. LOOK. All I'm saying is that Ava deserves a girlfriend because GearBox wronged her by writing her so poorly.

_ “I’m not in control, _ _   
_ _ All the wrong faces _ _   
_ _ In all the wrong places _ _   
_ _ They’ve left me so jaded.” _

* * *

Ava is twenty two. Seated at what was once a COV-outpost-turned-ramshackle-tavern and drinking a pint of  _ something _ , she’s spending her fleeting evening ruminating about the endless mystery and cruelty of the universe. 

Ave looks at her reflection in the liquor and notices the rich purple beneath her eyes, the splits in her lip from a mixture of anxious teeth and dry air, and the small, pink scar running along the apple of her cheek. She frowns, deepening the lines around her mouth. 

The bench she’s been sitting on squeaks loudly pulling her gaze from the well of her drink. Ava looks to her left, her eyes meeting a wide, green set. Warm and inviting, she’s being looked at with naked curiosity that almost makes her flinch. 

“Find anything interesting in there?” 

“Uh…” 

Sitting beside her is a woman close to her in age, with half of her long hair shaved. A thick, intricate braid is tied around itself and resting in a delicate pile atop her head. Lazy swipes of eyeliner encircle her eyes, and red lipstick clings to her mouth like a forlorn lover. She’s Pandora-tan and lithe, covered in tattoos and scars telling stories that seem older than she is. 

“I’m Evalynn, but you can call me Evie.” 

“Ah-- Ava.” 

“Cool name. Hope it’s okay I’m sitting here.”

Ava nods, perhaps a bit too emphatically. She looks at Evie perhaps a bit too long and swallows. She forces herself to take a sip of her drink, if only to look away. 

“I’ve seen you here before. You come here a lot actually,” Evie laughs. It sounds like a waterfall. Rushing, cool, and refreshing. 

“How do you, um, how do you know that?” 

“Well, probably because I’m here a lot too?” Evie nudges Ava’s leg with her own, and she nearly chokes on her drink. “I think you’re really cute. I like your style. It’s spunky.” 

“C-cute? Me? Oh, uhh, heh thanks.” 

“Do you smoke at all?’ 

“No.” 

“That’s cool. Do you wanna come outside with me while I smoke?” 

Ava stands and shrivels up inside. She begs herself to just tone it  _ down _ . “I mean, yeah, that’d be fine. Sure.” 

“Also cool. C’mon then, Ava.” 

Evie and Ava stand outside together, drinks in hand. They’re leaning against the metal rear of the tavern, still warm from the midday sun. Evie smokes a cigarette and blows wispy rings into the stale night air. 

Ava shifts. She watches Evie, gripped with fascination as her lips wrap around the smoke. She’s never really looked at the beauty in other people, save for Maya, but this is different. She likes Evie’s kind eyes, she likes her hair, and she likes the way the cigarette looks between her ruby lips. 

Evie finishes her smoke and tosses it aside, stamping the ember into the sands. She turns to Ava, close enough that the scent of tobacco and spirits wafts between them. 

“You know, I don’t think you’ve ever noticed me. And not to be a total weirdo, but I’ve taken this interest in you. And not for weird reasons, I promise.” 

Ava shifts. She isn’t quite sure how to process this situation. She takes another swing of the liquor and lets it burn a path to her stomach. 

“So, like, I’ve been on Pandora for a good chunk of time. My parents were like, HUGE into those Twin God assholes, right? I was born in a bandit clan, then I spent my late teen years in the COV. My mom and dad both got slurped up by Tyreen fucking Calypso. Shitty right? And like, I watched all the propaganda. Got a look at that stuff from the inside. I saw what happened to you and your Siren friend.”

Ava bristles, but Evie gives her a gentle wave. “No, no. Like I said, this isn’t to be weird. I’m not out for you because of that. I just, you know, know what it’s like. And whenever I’ve seen you, you’re always alone. I figured you could, like, use a friend or something. And you know, like I said before, I think you’re pretty cute.” 

Evie smiles and touches Ava’s cheek. Warmth floods her face and spreads, reaching long fingers towards her hairline and down her throat. Evie leans in, her eyes locking with Ava’s. 

Ava lets the liquor floating around her body dampen her normal reservations. She grabs the back of Evie’s head and pulls their mouths together.

Evie’s lips are smoother than hers, smokey and warm. She kisses Ava with a firm touch and cups her cheek with precious gentleness. 

They part after only a second. Evie’s lipstick is smeared, just a touch, and Ava can feel the glossy red shining on her own lips. She’s a little out of breath, feeling desperate and unwound by the progression of the night. She’s not mad though. 

“I hope this isn’t, like, too forward or anything but I’m shacked up not too far out from here. You wanna come have some free drinks?” 

Ava’s better senses tell her to say no. But when she looks at Evie’s lips and thinks about what a night alone with someone as pretty as she is could bring, it melts her resolve. She nods. 

“Yeah,” Ava says, suddenly aware of a sexuality she didn’t know she had. “Let’s do it.”

This night, Ava thought, would end either really well or really terribly. But having spent the last four years in the silence of Maya’s palpable absence, Ava feels herself open up just a bit. Whether or not she thought it was a good idea didn’t matter. She supposed, at least for now, the universe wasn’t always cruel. 

And if that were the case, Evie was a mystery Ava wanted to explore. 


	26. (in) Spite (of)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to write more for Ava and Evie. I'm not much of a fan of canon BL3 Ava, BUT I am a fan of girlfriend-having-kind-of-a-mess Ava.

_(in) **S**_ ** _pite_ ** _(_ _of)_ **_:_ ** _without being affected by the particular factor mentioned_

* * *

Ava wakes up on her stomach. Naked. 

She runs her dry tongue along her teeth and feels a grotty sense of ‘night after’ settle into her every fiber. With drool crusting around her mouth, sweat clinging to her skin, and a certain sense of abrasion on her lips, Ava rolls over and lets the cot cradle her. 

Her eyes wander to the ceiling and she sighs. Rests her palms on her stomach and breathes deeply, the way that Maya taught her. It staves off her creeping anxiety just enough for her eyes to close. Ava basks, even just for a second, in this precious calm. 

Evie sighs beside her and croaks, “g’mornin’, Aves. Sleep okay?” 

Ava looks at Evie. Her eyes are just as beautiful sober as they were drunk. 

Evie’s face softens and she leans over, kissing Ava’s lips tenderly. Nowhere near the fervor and craven desperation from late last night-- gripping fingers, tongues swirling on sensitive skin, Evie’s lips wrapped around her body and fitting like a glove… 

Ava shudders. Opens her eyes without even realizing they were closed. Evie’s propped up on her elbows now, her tender eyes searching Ava’s face. 

“Y’okay?” 

“Huh? Oh, uh, yeah. Just a little shocked I’m still,” Ava gestures vaguely. “...Alive?” 

Evie laughs and presses her mouth to Ava’s cheek. _Fuck_ , she thinks with some heat spilling into her face. _Her lips are so soft_. 

“I know a lot of queens kill their mates but, like, the dead mates are always male. Says a little something about me, I’d like to think.”

“You, uhh, got a point there.” 

Evie swings her leg over Ava’s hip and pulls herself to a seat. She places her warm palms on Ava’s chest, splaying her fingers and pushing out, gently massaging the skin. Evie quirks a brow and cocks her head to the side. She looks innocent. Ish. 

“What is it?” 

Ava chews her lip. “I, uh. Huh. Um, I think that, uuh-” 

Evie laughs. Dry and in her throat, it spills over her lips like sawdust and flecks of charcoal. “It’s okay. I can’t think right before I have coffee either.” 

“Y-you have _coffee_?”

“I surely do, but I think it’s gonna cost ya,” Evie says leaning in. “Kiss, please.” 

Ava’s teeth release her lip. She looks into Evie’s kind eyes, feels the warmth radiating off of her, takes in the musk and sweat that clings to their bodies in equal share. Nervousness quivers in the pit of her stomach. 

Ava, with shaking fingers and an unsure touch cups the back of Evie’s head and draws their mouths together gently. 

_Maybe,_ she thinks, in spite of herself. _I deserve to be happy after all_.


	27. Eclipse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting close to the end! Have a short little drabble for today.

**_Eclipse:_** _(of a celestial body) obscure the light from or to (another celestial body)_

* * *

Their positioning isn’t an accident. 

Tyreen, despite her waning statue in the presence of her gangly brother, casts a shadow longer and significantly darker than his own. She stands in the foreground, bathed in the unfiltered resplendence of the limelight. Tyreen’s presence is ivy: creeping slowly over every surface, a thousand heart-shaped leaves hiding the intent to strangle, choke, and overtake. 

Troy’s shadow is a smaller, slow growing, Not quite meager or meek, he shrinks to the background and hovers by the thin line between visible and jaded. There’s something to be said about a man so large in such small portion-- while his counterpart ate his space and didn't bother to chew. 

Troy watches Tyreen and doesn’t sulk. He considers, thoughtfully and tactile, on his emergence into the foreground. 

Like the moon crawling over the sun, Tyreen will not realize she is being cast to the back until the stars go dim and the sky blazes with shadow. 


End file.
